Sunday, September 30, 2012

Harassment of women gets more violent, but activists fight back

Egypt Independent

Thu, 27/09/2012

Aaron Ross

It is a sordid tale: A 16-year-old
girl is groped while walking along the street. She responds by spitting
in her attacker’s face, vowing to take back her rights. He, in turn,
guns her down with an automatic weapon.

That is what is alleged to have
happened to Eman Mostafa two weeks ago in a small village in Upper
Egypt’s Assiut Governorate. While details of the incident have only
slowly trickled out, the monstrosity of the alleged crime suggests a
frightening increase in gendered violence following a spate of
well-publicized cases of harassment and assault in recent months.

The suspect, Ramadan Nasser Salem, is
now in police custody after having fled for more than a week. In an
interview on Al-Hayat TV channel Saturday, he denied the version of
events offered by witnesses.

“I was riding my motorbike and I saw
her,” he said. “I said hello, and she thought I was harassing her and
started cursing at me and spat in my face. I mistakenly fired my gun,
and a passer-by told me the bullet hit a wall. We thought the girl was
afraid and fell on the ground, but then people told us that the bullet
hit her. I never meant to kill her.”

Salem’s denial notwithstanding, Dalia
Abd El-Hameed, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal
Rights, warns that the reported circumstances surrounding Mostafa’s
death reflect a disturbing trend in sexual abuse against women.

“It’s becoming more violent, and this
Assiut incident is a very vivid example of this,” she says. “He killed
her. He killed her just because she defended herself. The mere fact was
that she just didn’t accept what’s very accepted in society. When you
don’t accept the norm, society punishes you. And he punished her.”

A 2010 survey by the Egyptian Center
for Women’s Rights found that 83 percent of Egyptian women have
experienced harassment. In response, advocacy groups have pressed the
government to tackle the issue.

Their efforts have produced an
occasional glimmer of hope. In 2008, the government — for the first time
— sentenced a man to three years in prison on a sexual harassment
charge. In late 2010, 23 NGOs and human rights organizations teamed up
in what was hailed as an unprecedented initiative to amend the Penal
Code to more effectively address sexual harassment and assault, although
their momentum was upended by the revolution.

And yet, by most accounts, the
situation has only gotten worse. Some feel that in the past,
perpetrators would flee the scene of the crime out of shame or fear of
public backlash, but today’s perpetrators feel no such compunction.

Instead, silence by both the government and the public has enabled a much more virulent strain of abuse to take root.

“What is most disturbing and alarming
is that there is a paradigm shift, and sexual harassment now tends more
to be assault,” Abd El-Hameed says. “It’s more intrusive, it’s more
bold, and I think this is the result of immunity and impunity that the
perpetrators have from both the society and the police.”

More than that, she adds, police themselves have frequently been among the worst offenders.

The political and social instability of
the last year and a half has also been an important factor, says Hoda
Badran, chairwoman of the Alliance for Arab Women, as “women are more
vulnerable than others to violence.”

Indeed, several high-profile sexual
assaults have taken place at political rallies, most notably in Tahrir
Square. But Badran argues that the situation is slowly improving as
stability has gradually returned since the presidential election.

Activists working on the issue also
point to small but substantive gains. The high-profile attacks in Cairo
over the last few months helped spawn several grassroots initiatives
aimed at bringing public awareness to the problem.

Their efforts were on display Sunday in
a rally in front of the presidential palace co-organized by the social
advocacy organization Basma and Nefsi, a Cairo-based anti-harassment
group, to decry Mostafa’s death and demand a law specifically targeting
sexual harassment and assault.

About two dozen protesters lined the
sidewalk along the main boulevard at rush hour, holding signs bearing
messages such as “I don’t want to be afraid when I walk in the streets,”
and “Morsy, Morsy, where are you?” in reference to President Mohamed
Morsy. Basma has also organized patrols in metro stations to identify
sexual harassers and report them to police.

There is no shortage of idealism on the activists’ part.

At the rally Sunday, many passing
motorists signaled their approval by giving protesters the thumbs up.
Others were less impressed; several stopped to argue that women brought
the problem onto themselves with their immodest dress.

But even as the activists wage an
uphill battle to effect a measure of progress in Cairo, Mostafa’s case
underscores the daunting breadth of the problem. In spite of the
incident’s obvious shock value, it has generated scant media coverage
and, with the exceptions of a demonstration at Assiut University last
week and this week’s protest in Cairo, almost no public reaction.

That has not surprised Abd El-Hameed.

“Since we are a very urban-centric
country, what happens in Upper Egypt doesn’t necessarily grab the
attention of Cairo residents and the government, and so on. This is the
first thing,” she says. “The second part is the socioeconomic status of
the victim, and I guess it’s typical for people from the lowest wealth
quintile to not be taken care of or to not get enough attention.”

Or, as she put it more simply: “[Mostafa] was poor, she was young, she was a girl and he’s from Upper Egypt.”

Mostafa’s father, Mostafa Salama, appealed directly to the president in an interview with Al-Hayat.

“I call on President Morsy to look at
Upper Egypt and take care of it,” he says. “This is the man who spoke of
God and the Prophet Mohamed, and we voted for him. Now he should take
care of us.”

Although efforts at top-down reform
have so far failed, recent legislative initiatives in Pakistan and India
to protect women from harassment in the workplace suggest possible
paths forward for Egypt.

In 2010, Pakistan for the first time
defined sexual harassment in the law and required employers to create
inquiry committees to look into allegations of it.

Earlier this month, India’s lower house
of parliament passed a similar bill that would require employers and
local authorities to establish grievance committees to investigate
complaints of sexual harassment. It is expected to become law in the
coming months.

While women’s rights advocates in Egypt
have tended to eye Morsy warily, some still harbor hopes that he can
deliver similar reforms.

“I think that Morsy wants to do
something about the problem because it affects all women — secular,
Islamist — but he faces a lot of obstacles and opponents,” says Nihal
Zaghloul, an organizer with Basma.

But laws alone are unlikely to do much.
Critics have lambasted the Pakistani government over its failures to
effectively implement its statute.

Last year, the Asian Human Rights
Commission complained in an open letter to Pakistan’s president and
others that high-ranking government officials, including from the prime
minister’s office and the lower house of parliament, were working to
protect a well-connected university professor who had been found guilty
of sexual harassment by two separate inquiry committees.

Huma Yusuf, a Pakistani commentator, underlined the magnitude of the challenge in Dawn newspaper.

“To take the law’s spirit and
implementation seriously, the Pakistani state and activist network must
overcome the cultural prejudices not only of the Pakistani public, but
also of the world at large. It’s a tall task, but one that should not be
neglected,” Yusuf wrote.

Likewise, Egyptian activists readily
acknowledge that the root of the problem is not deficient policy —
sexual harassment and assault are already technically illegal — but
prevailing social norms that subjugate women and stigmatize those who
speak out. And while the revolution’s aftermath has created additional
challenges for women, it has also freed up grassroots organizations to
more effectively wage a battle for public opinion.

“What happened now is that by
mobilizing society as a whole during the revolution, you have a
mobilized mass — part of it is being mobilized against sexual harassment
and assault,” says Abd El-Hameed. “We have girls who make protests
against sexual harassment, we have posters, we have graffiti — so we
have diversity in the actors and the tools that are being used. And this
can lead to addressing the root of the problem.”